As the Muscat International Book Fair concluded on March 4, with wide participation across all ages, it brings back hope that the habit of reading has not yet disappeared. But much needs to be done to keep this hope intact, and indeed to normalise it.
If the doomsday pundits who predicted the end of reading were happily proved wrong, the battle is not won yet.
The distractions for the young, and not so young audience, is immense: think gaming, streaming and playing. All these activities are evolving, colourful and heavily marketed. Books don’t really seem to stand a chance.
And yet, evidence from book festivals across the world show that the appetite for new books, new ways of telling tales, and even old stories has not waned. If anything, the new packaging of book fairs as festivals of letters has given new life to an old form.
But to keep the momentum of interest going, it is important to involve the community from the grassroots.
Frank Cottrell-Boyce, in an article in ‘The Guardian’, spoke about how schools in England were using innovative ways of engaging children by empowering them with choices of what to read, how to read (in small bits, lying down on a bean bag or together in the school park), and even having whole school book swaps. He adds, “The key to reading for pleasure is having a choice about what you read”.
The ideas are endless, with sufficient motivation. It does not even require a lot of funding – just the enthusiasm and collective responsibility to raise a generation of children who would learn to love the written word.
We all know that children learn, and do, by example. Cultivating a habit of reading is not just about strategically putting a few books within eyeshot of kids at school, or even at home. Nor is it about buying them some colourfully illustrated books that have been sold with a disk, or read-along audio books. It is about spending time with children and their books, even setting an example by reading ourselves.
The tips for individuals are simple: spend an hour a day, even less, reading together as a family; discuss what children have read and enjoyed – listen to them instead of talking to, or at them; involve extended family members like grandparents by listening to the wealth of stories they have. For the wider community, the challenges are not insurmountable. Creating local spaces to exchange and share books is a great start. So is starting a small library with books collected from the neighbourhood, run collectively. Again, inviting elders of the community to read, narrate or recite their life stories would be a wonderful way to connect generations together.
The present century has emphatically shown us that books are not going away, in spite of all previous fears. Everybody loves a good story, told well. We would do well to not wait for book festivals to celebrate books but make it part of our everyday lives.
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